Living Sales Excellence - Dennis Connelly's Blog

Did you ever wonder why so few sales candidates become top performers, even when they survive the first six months? Take a look at the last five sales people hired at your company. Do you share this common experience - that they have not become top performers - with so many other companies? If you have less than optimal outcomes in your own business in this critical role, take a look at your selection strategy.

If you missed our recent open webinar on sales leadership, you won’t want to miss Part 2 of the series. You can view Part 1 here and register for Part 2 here. It will be held on March 12th at 11:00 AM ET.

You may download our White Papers on sales candidate selection by clicking here.

We’ve been talking a lot, this month, about how non-sales key executives in companies can impact sales. Chris Mott wrote about the role of the CFO in driving sales and Dave Kurlan wrote about the important and often overlooked role of the CTO in the sales effort. My recent article addressed Human Resources and specifically explored the traits sales people must possess to be successful. There’s a lot more to add in the HR category. Today, let’s look at what HR believes it should do when hiring sales candidates. And let’s talk about what goes wrong.

If you look at normal HR general procedures for hiring, you will find something like the following:

Advertise for candidates

Screen candidates

Properly interview

Understand personality

Demonstrated skills

Background checks

Pre-hire physicals

The first five of these steps are meaningful for our purposes in talking about how to build a world-class sales organization. We’ll leave numbers six and seven for HR to work out on their own. I have heard that those two last steps are commonly skipped. So let’s look at the first five one at a time.

Advertise for candidates

Almost all companies advertise for sales candidates ineffectively. This is usually because they believe that sales candidates are simply another employee just like any other employee, to fill a vacancy or to add a position. They are not. We want to attract normal employee candidates to the company. In sales, we want to reverse that. The advertisement is the first step. The ad must be written with the position in mind and it should address the nature of the selling environment so that the right person will see themselves in the ad. Start by looking at the selling environment from every angle and build your ad from there.

Screen Candidates

Since sales candidates are different, we need to screen them differently. The trick is to set up an environment as part of the screening call to reproduce a challenging sales environment. The best sales people rise to that challenge and even relish it. If you’re concerned that you’ll scare them off, then your still thinking this is a different position. It’s not IT, it’s not accounting, it’s not logistics, it’s not customer service, etc. It’s sales. Make them sell, or live to regret it.

Properly Interview

Like the screen, the first interview must re-create sales challenges. Do they know what they really want or are they throwing darts at their career? Is their resume real and do they own it? Are their inconsistencies we can call out? At this stage, we also want to carefully integrate the resume and any assessment tool we are using into the interview process. Interview skills can be learned that help you explore for issues and then dive deeper to uncover what’s really going on. If more than 50% of your interviewees aren’t stumped a few times and aren’t saying, “I hadn’t noticed that” or “I’ll rework my resume after this interview,” then you’re probably not doing it right.

Again, don’t confuse interviewing sales candidates with other positions. The object is not to be a jerk. It’s to create context for understanding their true skills and sales “DNA” and to see it in action. Let them perform. A recent interviewee insisted that he always asked lots of questions of prospects but asked me zero.

Understand Personality

This one is tricky. There are a bevy of personality tests and behavioral styles tests on the market and here’s what they all amount to: Something is better than nothing. The addition of thought and energy into the selection process does far more to improve the process than an inadequate personality test. Once you’ve decided to follow a process, to be highly selective, and to involve top executives, you’ve moved the needle as far as you can without adding tools that are scientifically proven to help in this area. Unfortunately, the more commonly used tools won’t budge the needle any further, if they are appear to do so.

Having analyzed over 650,000 sales candidates using the top-rated OMG assessment tool, we can confirm that there is no such thing as a sales personality. So why use a test that measures personality? There are also behavioral styles tests. While there are certain behaviors that a good sales person might exhibit, the behaviors must exist in a sales context independently of a social context or any other context. An example would be a CEO who is driven for success but not driven to be a sales superstar. If the test only measures drive, we’re lost.

Demonstrated Skills

Selling skills are important, of course, and this was the topic of my previous HR-related article. Click here read it. The takeaway is that often, the most important determining factors for sales success are hidden from view. The resume won’t reveal them; the interview won’t reveal them. Only a targeted assessment that specifically looks for them will do the job.

Demonstrated skills usually refers to specific selling skills. Does the candidate do the kinds of things that help them hunt for new business? Do they have the set of skills required of closers? Do their skills fit better with account management? Can they listen? Do they understand consultative selling? To find out if they are comfortable challenging prospects in specific selling situations is more difficult to determine. Sometimes candidates have all the answers and say all the right things, but due to hidden issues, cannot execute.

Now What?

Hiring good sales people is important. Getting it right the first time saves time, aggravation, and money. The typical HR hiring process, while generally sound, needs a few tweaks to make it work for hiring sales people, particularly in the area of selection process and assessments. Feel free to comment below if you would like to add to this discussion.

If you missed our recent webinar on sales leadership, you won’t want to miss Part 2 of the series. You can view Part 1 here. Register for Part 2 here. It will be held on March 12th at 11:00 AM ET.

You may download our White Papers on sales candidate selection by clicking here.

It is usually better to evaluate your current sales organization before bringing in new sales people. It helps in determining the ideal candidate and to setting up an environment conducive for onboarding and retaining top sales talent. If you are interested in an evaluation for your company, click here.

Today, Human Resource departments must find ever more skillful sales managers in a market where the number of skilled managers is actually declining. The data supports this odd trend, made even more interesting when you consider the vast growth in online sales content and the proliferation of sales books in the last 10 years. Last fall, Dave Kurlan reached into our vast database of sales assessments and identified the trend. Read about it and view the graph in this article. You will see the trend in the declining percentage of sales people and sales managers recommended by our sales and sales management candidate assessments. We have seen reductions of 6% for sales people and 15% for sales managers.

If you missed our recent webinar on sales leadership, you won’t want to miss Part 2 of the series. You can view Part 1 here. Register for Part 2 here. It will be held on March 12th at 11:00 AM ET.

What’s driving this trend, and what can business leaders do about it? One of the most important reasons is that selling itself has changed. When we assess candidates, we are looking for those who will actually succeed and make our clients successful. While good selling skills have always been a virtue, it hasn’t always been necessary. Not that long ago, during the internet age, but prior to the explosion in availability of fine-grained detail, sales people were needed to provide information that was relevant to prospects and unavailable any other way. Today, they must reinvent their value to their prospects.

In 1995, there were 15 thousand registered domains. Today, there are 350 million. In 2000, there were 360 million internet users. Today, there are 2.4 billion. Do you think you should hire the same selling skills for 2014 as you did just 15 years ago? This is a challenge for HR.

We no longer need sales people whose primary skill is giving presentations. Prospects have quite enough information, thank you. We need sales people who are more consultative, who ask good questions, enough questions, and tough enough questions to uncover the business needs and opportunities in a meaningful way for their prospects. Salespeople who consistently hear the phrases, “I don’t know.” and “No one has asked me that before.” are doing it right.

HR owns the challenge of finding sales candidates who can do that. What must they look for?

Some of the Required Skill Sets:

Consultative selling skills,

Modern hunting skills,

Lead qualification skills,

Account management skills, and

Business growth acumen.

Some of the More Difficult-To-Recognize Traits:

Rejection-proof,

Ability to listen,

Ability to stay in the moment,

Doesn't need to be liked,

Beliefs support success, and

Won’t get derailed at closing.

Some of the Near-Impossible-to-Recognize Traits:

Strong Desire,

Strong Commitment,

Positive Outlook, and

Takes Responsibility.

These are not easy to identify, but happily, there are ways to measure them. Traditional selection criteria won’t work. Most of the traits above cannot be easily discerned from an interview or a resume. Have you ever made a bad hiring decision by hiring the one person who outshined the other 20 candidates? Then you know this isn’t easy.

We’ve already learned that traditional assessment tools won’t help either. They are either based on personality or on behavioral styles. Despite the sales jargon that might be added for effect, they are ineffective at predicting sales success. We use the OMG tool which was built for sales and there is an interesting fact that emerged from a database of over 700,000 salespeople and sales management assessments. Ready? There is no such thing as a sales personality. I was on the phone today with a self-described introvert who ran a public library. He was an idea factory, full of passion for libraries and their many uses for making towns and cities wonderful places of learning and collaboration. He too was surprised to hear that there is no such thing as a sales personality.

This is a good time to think about how to build a better sales organization by using the tools available today to find salespeople who can prosper in today’s market. As we have seen, this represents a shrinking pool. HR must elevate standards and find ways to efficiently and effectively do what Tom Hanks’ character described in Saving Private Ryan as “finding a needle in a stack of needles.”

If you are interested in learning more about sales candidate selection, click here.

If you are interested in evaluating your current sales team, click here.